By Sarjo Barrow, Esq.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said that law should be a literary profession. I keep that line close because it runs opposite to how most of us were trained to think about our work. At least in The Gambia, it would appear, lawyers were taught that a lawyer argues, files, appears, and advises. Writing, in that picture, is a chore that ends when the motion is served. I admit, in law school, I found criminal defense work appealing for this reason—motion practice and less writing. But I was wrong. Writing is not a chore; it is arguably the most valuable skill a lawyer owns, and the one we in The Gambia have done the least to build.
I am no natural. I did not come up through elite schools. My foundation was Dankunku and Pakalinding for primary, then Tahir for secondary—a start that gave me a great deal but not the polished English some of my colleagues seem to have absorbed in the womb. What Tahir gave us was memorization—a whole book, commas and all—something I still struggle to call a gift or a curse. What I have instead is stubbornness and a method. I am a Bryan Garner disciple, married to his Winning Brief. I have worked through Reading Law, his book with Justice Scalia, and Justice Breyer’s Reading the Constitution, and I own the Chicago Manual of Style. I subscribe to The New York Times not for the news but to watch good writers work—to steal a rhythm here, a transition there. If someone who began where I began can learn to write moderately well and sign his name to it, the fear stopping you is smaller than you think.
That fear is the real barrier, and it hides behind four familiar excuses. I came to write this piece after reading an essay by Lieutenant Colonel Daniel D. Maurer, a United States Army judge advocate, titled “On Scholarship and Writing for Publication.” In it, he set out four excuses that keep lawyers from writing. It resonated deeply—every one of them is spoken in our corridors too.
First, as he argued, most people claim they don’t have time. None of us do. But an op-ed is not a treatise. It is nine hundred words about one thing you already know cold—a rule that confuses your juniors, a gap in a regulation, a bad practice everyone tolerates. You have argued it aloud a dozen times. Writing it down is not extra work; it is the same thinking made permanent.
Second, he listed not knowing what to write about. You do. Sit with what interests you, what irritates you, and what you keep having to explain to people who should already understand it. Somewhere in that list is your subject. The confusion you feel about a doctrine is not a disqualification—it is the very thing worth writing through.
Third, that it won’t be taken seriously. This one confuses expertise with fame. You do not need a famous name or a shelf of books to say something true and useful—only a clear question and an honest attempt to answer it. Seriousness comes from the work, not the reputation you bring to it.
Finally, that my seniors, the bench, or my employer won’t like it. Perhaps—and I can speak from experience, having had to get my work reviewed first. But a profession that cannot examine itself in print is not confident. Writing carefully about the law, even when it questions settled practice, is not disloyalty. It is the ordinary duty of anyone who claims to serve the law rather than merely use it.
Now, the part that should trouble us most. Walk into the University of The Gambia or the Gambia Law School and look at what our students read. Constitutional law, criminal law, professional responsibility, civil procedure—the core of a Gambian legal education—and much of the material was written for other countries, with other constitutions, codes, and courts in mind. A student learns the shape of the law from books never written with our 1997 Constitution or our courts in view, and is then expected to practice here.
This is not because we lack the people. We have lawyers who have argued these questions for thirty years, who know our criminal procedure better than any foreign author will, who have watched our constitutional law grow up in real time. The competence and experience are here—some of it sitting in people who could teach this material at secondary level without notes. What is missing is not knowledge. It is the habit of writing it down. This is not to say we lack authors in the legal field. We do, but they’re the exception. Not the norm. The likes of Hon. Justice Hassan Jallow, late Hon. Fafa Mbai, former A.G. Hon. Jammeh, Dr. Satang Nabaneh, Lawyer J. Darbo, and Lawyer Fatty. And I see few young lawyers who are getting in the habit of writing here and there.
In any case, there is a craft point buried in all this, the one Garner taught me best: know your reader. Writing for the public and writing for a court are two different disciplines. For the public, you write plain, clean English—short words, short sentences, no Latin, nothing you would be embarrassed to say aloud at a naming ceremony. For the court, you write in a tighter, more structured register, built to persuade a judge who has read a hundred briefs this month and won’t thank you for a hundred and one that wastes his time. The lawyer who can move between the two is more useful, not less. A writing culture trains that range, because it makes us write for readers who are not judges, in language that does not hide behind the robe.
Which brings me to the ask. We have, as far as I can tell, one standing law review, now in its seventh volume, carrying the written output of an entire profession—most of it by students or foreign professors. Seven volumes cannot train a generation. That is why the Gambia Bar Association should commit to a periodical of its own—quarterly if it can manage it, online if print is too dear, but regular and open to juniors. Give a young lawyer a place to practice, an editor to answer to, and the small terror of a deadline, and you will watch the single skill that compounds across a whole career begin to grow. Writing is not what a lawyer does after the real work. Very often it is the real work.
So, pick up a pen and begin. Let your madman loose. Start with what you know, or what you cannot stop thinking about. Keep it short. Keep it plain. And when it is done, do the one part that still frightens most of us more than any argument in court: sign your name.
